Want to take your pitch to the next level? You need to customise it! By using Campaigns and link alerts, you can demonstrate more value in your pitch and show that you’re 10 steps ahead of anybody else looking at your website.
Transcript
Ken: Okay Dixon, the next step is really impressing with your pitch. You really don’t want to do just the standard pitch, you need to customize.
Dixon: If you just send out your brochure so to speak, then you’re not really pitching at all, are you? They’ve already looked at your website and I think that’s different, you know, 10, 20 years ago when, you know, you could then just send out your brochure. But people have already done that, they’ve already screened you, you’ve now screened them, now you need to give them something of value. That pitch itself needs to demonstrate value even if you don’t get the business at the far end, you’re going to need to demonstrate that you’re 10 steps ahead of anybody else looking at your website.
Ken: Right. Okay. So, it’s worth investing in this because it adds to your power, and adds to the attractiveness perhaps of your pitch if you’re telling them something that they don’t know.
Dixon: Yes, absolutely. And so, it starts with setting up a campaign. So, Majestic has this campaigns section on the website, and the great thing about doing that is it sets a benchmark up for your website. So, you set up a campaign of your customer that you’re looking for, and the sort of competitor cohort. So, four or five competitor websites put their home pages into a campaign and you can see everything side by side, that immediately gives you some great visuals. You’ve got some fantastic live shots of real numbers that you can then put into a pitch instantly. The other reason for setting up a campaign from day one even before you’ve got the client, it’s not expensive money wise to set up lots and lots and lots of campaigns. But the other good reason is that from a campaign you can instantly jump into all the other tools later on.
So, having that campaign setup frames it if you’re an agency, then you know where to go to see all the information that you’ve been working on for a particular client. It’s looking at their own individual ecosystem or their own marketing environment very specific and very tailored to them. And I think that that is a really important thing to take on board.
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Ken: And one of the things I wouldn’t forget about there is just to set up an email alert even at this pitch stage. Setting up an email alert as we use [crosstalk 00:02:39]
Dixon: Yes. So you can then, you know, from the campaigns you can then say right, “Tell me when things change on, you know, on these…on the sites,” and it starts sending you emails so that you don’t get caught out, you know…
Ken: Something tremendous is happened [crosstalk 00:02:51].
Dixon: …going down to do the presentation, you know, something has happened, you want to know about that for sure. Yeah, absolutely. So, I think great visuals link a lot…link alerts. Having a cohort of your competitors there shows a customer straightaway that you understand the environment, but also gives them some very real data on which to understand the job that they’ve got at hand, you know. If they’ve got, you know, their homepage sitting at trust flow 10 and their competitors home pages are or target pages, or landing pages, are sitting at trust flow 72, there’s a disconnect that you’re not going to be able to overcome. So, you need to compete with cohorts that are competable if you like. And one of the things actually there is I like to work with homepage metrics as opposed to whole domain metrics.
Ken: Why is that Dixon?
Dixon: Here’s the thing, the way that the algorithms work at Google PageRank was always done at the page level. And so, whilst you default to, you know, looking at all the links to a domain, and all the wrapped up trust flow of a domain, the truth of the matter is that Google says, your homepage is probably the best page on your website. And each individual page on your website is a page on the internet. When Google search results come back, they don’t give you websites, they give you individual pages. It may be a homepage, it may not be a homepage, but they give you individual pages. So, if you’re trying to do search engine optimization, it’s an important thing to understand the Google returning pages, not sites. So, if you want to get an idea of customers brand, then you’re actually better off looking at the homepage, the URL level metric of the homepage because all of the other pages that a site has will link into the homepage.
So, it will be the strongest page on the website, also your other brand presence. You might have, you know, blogs out or medium.com, or you might have links from your Twitter profile, or you may have other parts of your brand that aren’t on your website but probably linked to your website. So, it’s still a good place to be as a way to look at the overall score, trust flow or citation flow the overall score of your brand. But also you’re then comparing a page with other competitors pages, so you’re comparing like with like. If you put in the domain level metrics into your campaign, the problem there is that you might be at yoursite.com, your competitor, one competitor maybe at www.theirsite.com. And then Amazon is so big that, you know, you then find yourself if you’re trying to do like having to put amazon.com’s page in there, whereas you really you want to be looking at a product page, or a category page, or something very, very specific.
So, looking at page versus page is important. And then you can, you know, we can talk about how you find that cohort, you know. One way to find that cohort is to put in your key term and see what are the 10 most important pages that come up on Google for example, that could be your cohort. But it’s also likely that you know who your business competitors are, you know, it’s your business or your client knows their business and you should ask them who they think their competitors are and track down their sites and their homepages and put those into the system.
Ken: Yes, but don’t just take their word as gospel, really got the [inaudible 00:06:45]
Dixon: No, take one or two others that they didn’t know were competitors or they didn’t describe to you because it may be that, you know, their whole cohort is getting wiped out by, you know, a third party.
Ken: And one of the things we’re talking about here is working at scale, which also means being incredibly time efficient. So, I think getting into a process, a process a way of doing every pitch is important.
Dixon: And if you’ve got to job number one, get that campaign setup and then from there on in going to the campaign almost two clicks away are all of the important visuals. And, you know, as we say majestic has some great visuals, if you know where to look and they’re tailored to your business, but they’re one click away then. So, if you want to compare the market, and I don’t mean in a Meerkat kind of sense for the Brits amongst us, if you want to have a look at the cohort, then literally from the campaign you can go into all of the main tools that click on to tool
[inaudible 00:07:48]
backlink checker tool, you know, the URL submitted tool, the backlink history tools.
They’re all click away once you’re in the campaign and you know what you’re doing, and from there, you can really have a checklist and say, “Right, let’s check this is, is this important? Should we bring this to client? Should we bring it into the pitch?”
And because you’re then comparing your business with the other business in the cohort, it becomes very obvious the kind of work that is going to need to be done. And it also shows you…shows a client that you’ve got information at your fingertips that they can’t get.
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Ken: I think that’s really important that the information is at your fingertips and if you follow that, if you follow this method, you’re setting yourself up for success.
Dixon: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And of course, you’ve got that benchmark now because you’ve set your campaign up to demonstrate success at some point in the future when you’ve got the business and started working on it and improve their lot.
Ken: Terrific. Okay.
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